Britain's Kabul embassy installs bottom scanners

The British Embassy in Kabul has followed in the footsteps of high-security
prisons around the world by installing what might politely be described as
an electronic orifice scanner to screen visitors for weapons concealed
inside their bodies.

Recent visitors have described being asked to sit in an "electric chair", which uses magnetic sensors to detect hidden metal inside the anus or other cavities.

British officials will not comment on the issue for fear of compromising security.

However, the subject has become the butt of jokes around Kabul's community of expat aid workers, diplomats and journalists who have been asked to sit on the imposing throne as they arrive for appointments.

"There was a big grey chair inside the guard hut at one of the entrances which the Gurkhas said visitors had to sit on," said one visitor, who said he was stunned by the new piece of equipment. "No one could really believe it when they said what it was for.

The Body Orifice Security Scanner (Boss) is essentially a powerful metal detector that is used in prisons to avoid the need for intimate cavity searches.

It has been installed to root out hidden mobile phones, sim cards or other metallic contraband.

In Afghanistan, it also means that visitors to Britain's fortified embassy to do not have endure a pat-down of intimate areas – an important consideration in a conservative, Muslim society.

Its value was underlined earlier this month when a suicide bomber detonated explosives concealed in his underpants in an attempt on the life of Asadullah Khalid, head of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security. He survived the attack on Thursday but was badly injured.

It was the latest example of how attackers are developing tactics to evade tight security around VIPs.

Last year, the leader of Afghanistan's High Peace Council was killed by a bomb hidden in a visitor's turban – an area not previously searched for fear of causing offence.

And in 2009, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, al-Qaeda's head bombmaker in Yemen, inserted explosives into the rectum of his brother in an unsuccessful effort to assassinate Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief.

A spokesman for the British embassy said: "If it's part of security to get into the embassy then it's not something we comment on, for obvious reasons."